WEBVTT - he monetized the web. now he has a plan to fix it 0:00:09.960 --> 0:00:14.400 In the nineteen nineties, we had this idea that the 0:00:14.440 --> 0:00:17.079 Internet was just this open space and we could try 0:00:17.480 --> 0:00:21.520 all sorts of nonsense there. Piero Midjar wants to sell 0:00:21.520 --> 0:00:24.959 his pez collection, and you end up with eBay, and 0:00:25.000 --> 0:00:27.120 then people realize that people are ripping each other off 0:00:27.120 --> 0:00:29.160 on eBay, and so you end up with an escro service, 0:00:29.200 --> 0:00:32.680 and that turns into PayPal, and like, all these things happen, 0:00:33.120 --> 0:00:36.600 and they happen really really fast. I want us to 0:00:36.640 --> 0:00:40.479 get back to that moment of thinking things are possible. 0:00:41.360 --> 0:00:45.000 Ethan Zuckerman is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 0:00:45.240 --> 0:00:47.919 He's also something of an Internet activist, and. 0:00:47.880 --> 0:00:50.479 I work on a whole lot of projects trying to 0:00:50.479 --> 0:00:53.240 make the Internet a better place, which I still believe 0:00:53.320 --> 0:00:55.680 can happen despite all the evidence of the contrary. 0:00:56.000 --> 0:00:57.720 You know what, you may be one of the last 0:00:57.760 --> 0:00:59.360 soldiers standing on that battlefield. 0:00:59.400 --> 0:01:02.600 I know, man, I know, I know it's a lonely 0:01:02.640 --> 0:01:04.080 place to be. But you know, the great thing about 0:01:04.080 --> 0:01:06.560 being a professor is that I can try to win 0:01:06.680 --> 0:01:10.520 over students to the cause, and every so often, you know, 0:01:10.560 --> 0:01:13.120 we get a win. Every so often. People are excited 0:01:13.120 --> 0:01:18.440 about this idea that things actually can change, and I 0:01:18.520 --> 0:01:19.880 think a lot of it just hass to do with 0:01:20.040 --> 0:01:21.080 reframing our thinking. 0:01:21.600 --> 0:01:25.039 Ethan is one of the most unusual professors I've ever 0:01:25.080 --> 0:01:28.040 spoken to. So, first off, if you're of a certain age, 0:01:28.120 --> 0:01:31.080 I guarantee you that you've seen his work. It might 0:01:31.120 --> 0:01:33.160 have made you mad, It might have made you money, 0:01:33.319 --> 0:01:35.720 it might have done both at the same time. The second, 0:01:36.000 --> 0:01:40.040 Ethan really really likes Facebook, so much so that he 0:01:40.200 --> 0:01:43.080 sued Facebook, and you know what, after listening to what 0:01:43.120 --> 0:01:45.280 he has to say, you might want him to win 0:01:50.200 --> 0:01:57.680 from Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill Switch. I'm 0:01:57.720 --> 0:02:00.000 Dexter Thomas. 0:02:04.800 --> 0:02:42.160 I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Good bye. 0:02:46.720 --> 0:02:50.040 Ethan Zuckerman wants to fix the Internet. But before we 0:02:50.040 --> 0:02:51.720 could talk about how he would do that, we need 0:02:51.720 --> 0:02:56.000 to understand how we got here. We've talked about this 0:02:56.080 --> 0:02:58.560 here before on the show, but early on the Internet 0:02:58.639 --> 0:03:02.560 was a much more optimistic place until money basically ruined it. 0:03:02.880 --> 0:03:05.320 If you haven't caught our episode with Tim, we'll definitely 0:03:05.400 --> 0:03:08.760 check that one out too. So Ethan started his career 0:03:08.840 --> 0:03:10.920 during those early dot com days. He was one of 0:03:10.919 --> 0:03:14.520 the first employees at a company called Tripod, and Tripod 0:03:14.600 --> 0:03:16.120 was most well known for being a place where you 0:03:16.120 --> 0:03:18.760 could build your own homepage, which back then was a 0:03:18.800 --> 0:03:22.040 really exciting thing. There were all kinds of communities popping 0:03:22.120 --> 0:03:25.560 up online and Tripod was helping to foster that. But 0:03:25.600 --> 0:03:28.200 in order to do that, they needed money, and so 0:03:28.440 --> 0:03:33.120 they started looking at advertising. I was a GeoCities person. Yep, 0:03:33.200 --> 0:03:35.600 that's what I was on. We're talking pre my Space here, 0:03:35.640 --> 0:03:36.520 but I remember. 0:03:36.240 --> 0:03:38.760 We're talking pre my Space and that was our leading 0:03:38.800 --> 0:03:41.160 competitor at Tripods. So I'm not going to hold that 0:03:41.200 --> 0:03:44.480 against you, Dexter, but you know, that is a bit 0:03:44.520 --> 0:03:46.200 of a you know, you did just a little bit 0:03:46.200 --> 0:03:48.520 of a Yankees Mets thing there. You gotta be careful about. 0:03:48.560 --> 0:03:51.600 God, Hey, listen, I'm just trying to be honest with you. 0:03:51.640 --> 0:03:53.640 I'm just fair enough. That's where I went. 0:03:53.920 --> 0:03:57.520 But you know, I mean, as I was entering this 0:03:57.680 --> 0:04:00.520 phase of Wow, there's all these other people made things, 0:04:00.520 --> 0:04:04.000 and I would like to make things too. Very early 0:04:04.040 --> 0:04:06.600 in that stage, I realized that that was always going 0:04:06.640 --> 0:04:10.160 to mean there's gonna be ads next to whatever I did, 0:04:10.600 --> 0:04:13.680 or on top of whatever I did, or inside of 0:04:13.720 --> 0:04:17.920 whatever I did. And that started to feel very normal. 0:04:18.360 --> 0:04:22.479 Yeah, So like roll back to GeoCities and I'm going 0:04:22.520 --> 0:04:23.880 to tell you what's going on a tripod. 0:04:23.960 --> 0:04:24.120 Right. 0:04:24.200 --> 0:04:27.320 So, so our biggest rival geo cities is West Coast. 0:04:27.360 --> 0:04:30.280 We're East Coast. So there's beef. We know each other, 0:04:30.480 --> 0:04:33.000 we're you know, we're in touch with one another. But 0:04:33.160 --> 0:04:36.800 we're all trying the same ideas. We try a subscription service. 0:04:36.839 --> 0:04:38.800 We've got it. You know, you can sign up, you 0:04:38.800 --> 0:04:42.120 can get extra space, you can get premium customer service. 0:04:42.480 --> 0:04:46.320 Nobody wants that. We try merch We make the tea shirts, 0:04:46.360 --> 0:04:48.520 we make the hats. We're psyched that people want to 0:04:48.520 --> 0:04:52.080 identify with Tripod. We think that's a way that we're 0:04:52.080 --> 0:04:55.880 going to go. We go with sponsorship. We actually have 0:04:56.000 --> 0:04:59.080 sponsors who are like these are probably high school and 0:04:59.080 --> 0:05:01.760 college students. You know what high school and college students 0:05:01.839 --> 0:05:05.200 really love is mutual funds. Calvert Mutual Funds comes on 0:05:05.400 --> 0:05:08.240 and says, we want to sponsor people to go and 0:05:08.240 --> 0:05:11.120 get mutual funds. The only thing that works for us 0:05:11.200 --> 0:05:17.479 dexter is advertising, and the whole industry moves there at 0:05:17.520 --> 0:05:21.039 the same time and at a certain point, if you're 0:05:21.120 --> 0:05:24.480 trying something new, if you're trying a different business model, 0:05:25.320 --> 0:05:29.479 your pitch to an investor gets very tricky. What the 0:05:29.560 --> 0:05:32.400 investors want to hear is how many page views are 0:05:32.400 --> 0:05:34.360 you getting a month and how fast is it growing? 0:05:35.080 --> 0:05:39.720 And because we have eighteen million people like you who 0:05:39.839 --> 0:05:42.640 put home pages on the site, we are getting the 0:05:42.760 --> 0:05:46.640 eighth most page views on the Internet and it's growing 0:05:46.760 --> 0:05:50.760 something like ten percent a month. And companies like Yahoo 0:05:51.000 --> 0:05:53.320 are coming and knocking on our door and saying we 0:05:53.320 --> 0:05:57.520 would like to do some business. We are like, you know, 0:05:57.880 --> 0:06:01.360 kids in our twenties in the top floor of a 0:06:01.760 --> 0:06:07.600 plastic factory in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and like Jerry Yang from 0:06:07.680 --> 0:06:10.320 Yahoo is calling us, and we're like, yeah, I guess 0:06:10.400 --> 0:06:11.520 advertising is the way to go. 0:06:12.320 --> 0:06:14.839 So advertising is the way to go might not be 0:06:14.920 --> 0:06:19.479 the most idealistic phrase ever, but again, advertising made Tripod work, 0:06:19.760 --> 0:06:22.520 and it also made some pretty interesting things possible. 0:06:23.040 --> 0:06:25.440 The other thing it's an amazing model for is for 0:06:25.640 --> 0:06:31.400 people who are unbanked, who are not part of the 0:06:31.440 --> 0:06:35.680 mainstream financial system, who are in countries where the amounts 0:06:35.680 --> 0:06:39.600 of money would be very challenging. One thing you probably 0:06:39.600 --> 0:06:41.320 did not know when you were fooling around with that 0:06:41.360 --> 0:06:46.000 Tripod homepage is that our number two country for users 0:06:46.080 --> 0:06:48.760 was Malaysia. And what was going on in Malaysia at 0:06:48.760 --> 0:06:53.240 that point was most of the political opposition was using 0:06:53.320 --> 0:06:58.159 Tripod to organize and it became the voice of the 0:06:58.200 --> 0:07:02.960 Malaysian REFORMASSEI movement, And those folks might have been able 0:07:03.279 --> 0:07:08.600 to afford official websites somewhere, but they weren't really set 0:07:08.680 --> 0:07:12.600 up for transacting with Malaysian users. They probably didn't have 0:07:12.640 --> 0:07:15.800 credit cards, they didn't have the payment mechanisms. So advertising 0:07:15.880 --> 0:07:19.280 is a great way to help out people who are 0:07:19.400 --> 0:07:22.680 coming from different parts of the world, who have different resources. 0:07:23.280 --> 0:07:27.120 It wasn't just Tripod. Advertising became the default model for 0:07:27.160 --> 0:07:30.840 supporting publishing on the Internet, which shouldn't be surprising. They 0:07:30.840 --> 0:07:33.760 were just adapting what print magazines and newspapers were doing. 0:07:34.360 --> 0:07:38.000 Ads at this point are being sold by what's called CPM, 0:07:38.440 --> 0:07:42.440 and CPM is cost per mill which you know, confusingly enough, 0:07:42.480 --> 0:07:45.880 is cost per thousand, right. It's a term coming out 0:07:45.920 --> 0:07:50.360 of the newspaper and magazine industry, And so if you 0:07:50.440 --> 0:07:54.640 want to buy a page in Wired, for instance, you're 0:07:54.720 --> 0:07:58.640 basically being told by Wired, well, here's our circulation. You know, 0:07:58.760 --> 0:08:03.320 we're reaching fifty thousand people multiply that out by the 0:08:03.480 --> 0:08:06.840 cost per thousand that's what you're gonna pay for a page. 0:08:06.840 --> 0:08:09.840 And Wired we come in nineteen ninety five and go, 0:08:10.360 --> 0:08:12.480 we are so much better than that page. And Wired 0:08:12.920 --> 0:08:14.680 you can click on our ad and it will take 0:08:14.680 --> 0:08:17.800 you to your website and people might spend hours with you, 0:08:17.960 --> 0:08:20.600 not just that moment on the page, and you can 0:08:20.640 --> 0:08:23.680 take their name and address. So we are worth so 0:08:23.920 --> 0:08:27.520 much more than that magazine ad. So we start out 0:08:27.720 --> 0:08:29.960 pricing the way that magazine ads are. We're is charging 0:08:30.000 --> 0:08:34.720 like fifty bucks for one thousand impressions. And then people 0:08:34.840 --> 0:08:37.000 realize that there's ads all. 0:08:36.880 --> 0:08:37.480 Over the web. 0:08:38.160 --> 0:08:41.120 You can go wherever you want and get ad inventory, 0:08:41.600 --> 0:08:44.160 and so suddenly it drops to like a dollar per 0:08:44.240 --> 0:08:48.880 thousand impressions. And then Overture, which is a company that's 0:08:48.880 --> 0:08:52.400 affiliated with Yahoo, comes in and says, you know, the 0:08:52.440 --> 0:08:55.560 ads that you don't click on, those shouldn't count, and 0:08:55.640 --> 0:08:58.600 so then it moves to cost per click, and that's 0:08:58.600 --> 0:09:03.920 an entirely different space. In the course of five years, 0:09:04.480 --> 0:09:07.360 we go from ads being fifty two one hundred dollars 0:09:07.360 --> 0:09:12.160 for one thousand impressions to being twenty five cents for 0:09:12.200 --> 0:09:17.440 a thousand impressions to being impressions don't matter. We will 0:09:17.480 --> 0:09:20.600 pay anywhere from a penny to ten bucks per collect 0:09:20.600 --> 0:09:21.720 depending on what the ad is. 0:09:22.800 --> 0:09:25.600 And you know where this goes. Ads not only became 0:09:25.640 --> 0:09:28.560 an escapable on the Internet, but as clicks become the 0:09:28.600 --> 0:09:31.679 metric of success, you have to start listening to what 0:09:31.720 --> 0:09:34.480 the advertisers want. And so here's the thing about Ethan. 0:09:34.840 --> 0:09:37.640 He wasn't just a pioneer in the early dot com boom. 0:09:37.679 --> 0:09:40.360 He helped facilitate it by figuring out a way to 0:09:40.440 --> 0:09:43.440 keep those advertisers shilling out that money for our websites. 0:09:43.880 --> 0:09:47.240 He essentially invented was now known as the pop up ad. 0:09:47.679 --> 0:09:50.760 To be clear, he regrets that he did this the 0:09:50.760 --> 0:09:53.120 innovation of pop up ads, and we should call it 0:09:53.160 --> 0:09:53.680 an innovation. 0:09:54.160 --> 0:09:56.040 I think I'm not going to let you get away 0:09:56.080 --> 0:10:00.000 with innovation. First of all, come up ads no, no, no, no, sorry, 0:10:00.760 --> 0:10:04.400 I'm sorry. Pop up ads are, to use a technical term, 0:10:04.600 --> 0:10:10.079 a Cluegi hack. It is an inelegant solution to a problem, 0:10:10.480 --> 0:10:15.199 and unfortunately, like a lot of cluegi hacks, it still persists, 0:10:15.240 --> 0:10:17.240 although thank god, not as much as it used to. 0:10:17.600 --> 0:10:20.079 So here's the story on the pop up bed. Let's 0:10:20.080 --> 0:10:24.559 go back to nineteen ninety six. We've got an increasing 0:10:24.640 --> 0:10:28.520 number of user homepages. They have become the center of 0:10:28.559 --> 0:10:31.040 our business. Tripod thought it was going to be like 0:10:31.120 --> 0:10:34.160 a magazine and educational site for young people. My friend 0:10:34.200 --> 0:10:37.720 Jeff Vanderklute, without my permission, I should add, puts up 0:10:37.720 --> 0:10:41.559 a homepage builder. We discover a couple months later, when 0:10:41.559 --> 0:10:44.400 our bandwidth bill has gone through the ceiling, that it 0:10:44.440 --> 0:10:46.840 is the most popular thing on our site. So it's 0:10:46.880 --> 0:10:49.560 completely accidental. We get into the business completely by accident. 0:10:50.160 --> 0:10:54.480 But by nineteen ninety six, my boss Bo Peebet understands 0:10:54.520 --> 0:10:56.480 that this is the tail that's wagging the dog. He 0:10:56.600 --> 0:10:58.880 understands that this is where our growth is coming from. 0:10:59.520 --> 0:11:01.959 And he's trying to sell ad inventory on this. And 0:11:02.000 --> 0:11:06.800 we've got ad execs going out and they are showing 0:11:07.400 --> 0:11:11.600 random homepages with ads on them, and often those ads 0:11:11.720 --> 0:11:15.280 are showing up on content that the advertisers do not 0:11:15.400 --> 0:11:20.040 want to be associated with. Sometimes it's extremism, sometimes it's pornography. 0:11:20.920 --> 0:11:23.640 It is the web, right and unfortunately, you know, the 0:11:23.679 --> 0:11:26.920 Internet has been an if he placed going back into 0:11:26.920 --> 0:11:30.720 the nineteen seventies, so Bo comes to me and says, look, 0:11:31.080 --> 0:11:34.079 we got to run ads against the homepages. But as 0:11:34.200 --> 0:11:37.560 long as the ad is on the homepage, the advertiser 0:11:37.600 --> 0:11:42.000 feels like they're endorsing them. What can you do? And 0:11:42.160 --> 0:11:46.840 I invent the nav bar. The navbar is a vertical panel. 0:11:47.640 --> 0:11:50.160 It has a two hundred by two hundred add on it, 0:11:50.160 --> 0:11:54.040 It has Tripod branding, it has some navigation links, and 0:11:54.080 --> 0:11:57.840 so it's like, hey, here's Dexter's homepage, but also here's 0:11:57.840 --> 0:12:01.880 some Tripod branding, some navigation. Oh and by the way, 0:12:01.960 --> 0:12:05.800 an ad. And they're separate windows. So it's very clear 0:12:05.840 --> 0:12:09.079 that the ad is against Tripod and your homepage is 0:12:09.120 --> 0:12:09.640 your space. 0:12:10.320 --> 0:12:13.040 So the pop up ad was created to solve a problem. 0:12:13.280 --> 0:12:16.560 Advertisers were scared that their ads would show up somewhere unsavory, 0:12:16.960 --> 0:12:19.160 and the pop up helped to alleviate that fear by 0:12:19.200 --> 0:12:22.520 creating that separation so that they would keep that money flowing. 0:12:23.040 --> 0:12:25.400 And I'm like, this is great, I've worked it out. 0:12:25.559 --> 0:12:28.920 It's a solution. We put up the little piece of JavaScript, 0:12:28.960 --> 0:12:31.080 we insert it into every one of the homepages that's 0:12:31.080 --> 0:12:33.480 out there. We got a little pushback. People are sort 0:12:33.480 --> 0:12:35.480 of like, you know, what's going on? Why is there 0:12:35.520 --> 0:12:38.160 this extra weird window here, But we don't get a 0:12:38.200 --> 0:12:42.760 ton of pushback. Your guys at GeoCities take my code, 0:12:43.400 --> 0:12:46.600 they turn it from vertical into horizontal. They take my 0:12:46.920 --> 0:12:50.040 polite little two hundred by two hundred AD and they 0:12:50.080 --> 0:12:53.120 turn it into you a full withd like seven hundred 0:12:53.120 --> 0:12:56.640 pixel AD and there's no branding or anything. It's just 0:12:56.720 --> 0:13:01.560 an AD. So I do the first pop up, and 0:13:01.640 --> 0:13:04.040 it is a pop up AD. So I'm absolutely owning 0:13:04.120 --> 0:13:06.160 up to it. But it was trying to be maybe 0:13:06.200 --> 0:13:09.080 a bit more than that. The essence of it gets 0:13:09.120 --> 0:13:12.920 stripped down to a pop up AD, and then it's 0:13:12.960 --> 0:13:15.240 off to the races, right like then people are doing 0:13:15.280 --> 0:13:18.160 these pop unders. They're doing pop ups that can't be minimized, 0:13:18.160 --> 0:13:22.360 so on and so forth, and you have really the 0:13:22.559 --> 0:13:26.719 scourge of the nineteen nineties and early two thousands internet. 0:13:27.160 --> 0:13:29.400 And let me just say just to be clear on this. 0:13:30.160 --> 0:13:32.720 When we were talking before this interview, I told you 0:13:32.880 --> 0:13:35.120 I did not want to do an interview on pop 0:13:35.200 --> 0:13:37.559 up ads. And part of it is that it's a 0:13:37.600 --> 0:13:40.840 little too easy. It's a little like you know, look, 0:13:40.840 --> 0:13:43.679 it's the Robert Oppenheimer of the Internet who hates his creation. 0:13:44.600 --> 0:13:48.400 Let me be honest with you, Dexter, I get hate mail. 0:13:48.720 --> 0:13:52.240 Every time someone writes a story. I get death threats. 0:13:52.920 --> 0:13:57.439 I have a relationship with my local police department in 0:13:57.480 --> 0:14:01.680 this small town in western Massachusetts where they know not 0:14:01.800 --> 0:14:04.840 to call a swap team to my residence because almost 0:14:04.880 --> 0:14:07.320 every time I do an interview on pop ups that 0:14:07.360 --> 0:14:11.080 gets some exposure, we get an arm response call. So 0:14:11.920 --> 0:14:15.520 it's a thing, and it's interesting. It's definitely the sort 0:14:15.520 --> 0:14:17.839 of thing that I did not anticipate, either when building 0:14:17.880 --> 0:14:22.280 the pop up or twenty years later, owning up to 0:14:22.320 --> 0:14:25.720 building the pop up and talking about it as a problem. 0:14:26.560 --> 0:14:29.600 Seeing all the anger that gets directed in Ethan is. 0:14:29.720 --> 0:14:33.120 Aside from being really terrifying, it's also kind of confusing 0:14:33.160 --> 0:14:37.480 because really you're mad about pop ups in twenty twenty six, like, 0:14:37.520 --> 0:14:39.480 are you still dialing up from your mom's dell in 0:14:39.520 --> 0:14:40.200 the living room? 0:14:40.720 --> 0:14:40.920 Yell? 0:14:40.920 --> 0:14:43.160 Are mad at the wrong dude? Because first off, pop 0:14:43.240 --> 0:14:45.200 ups didn't even last that long. We're going to come 0:14:45.200 --> 0:14:48.320 back to that later, but the industry has long since 0:14:48.360 --> 0:14:51.040 moved on to something that has zero to do with 0:14:51.080 --> 0:14:54.400 what anyone at tripod dot com could ever even thought 0:14:54.400 --> 0:14:57.600 of back then. Traditional banner ads, which again, this is 0:14:57.600 --> 0:15:00.800 the thing that Ethan was trying to replace. Those came back, 0:15:01.160 --> 0:15:04.600 and they came back stronger. Remember, the original problem was 0:15:04.640 --> 0:15:07.480 that banner ads might be irrelevant to the website that 0:15:07.560 --> 0:15:10.240 they were on, and thus irrelevant to you, the user. 0:15:10.840 --> 0:15:13.080 But the industry figured out how to make those ads 0:15:13.160 --> 0:15:17.360 much more relevant to you by watching everything you do 0:15:17.480 --> 0:15:20.680 on the Internet. And this is where Ethan started thinking 0:15:20.880 --> 0:15:21.680 a little differently. 0:15:22.640 --> 0:15:26.960 The problem with advertising, as I see it, is that 0:15:27.000 --> 0:15:29.120 the people who have been trying to make money out 0:15:29.120 --> 0:15:34.840 of advertising have tried to add every possible piece of 0:15:34.880 --> 0:15:38.960 information to the equation. They want to know where you are, 0:15:39.440 --> 0:15:41.440 They want to know where else on the Internet that 0:15:41.480 --> 0:15:44.160 you've been, They want to know what you've done, what 0:15:44.200 --> 0:15:48.000 you've searched for previously. And so they turned this Internet, 0:15:48.040 --> 0:15:50.960 this super exciting space that we're building in the nineteen nineties, 0:15:51.480 --> 0:15:56.120 into a surveillance machine. My friend Chan Regenda Nikolucci, and 0:15:56.160 --> 0:15:59.600 I started looking at this and saying, what if you 0:15:59.680 --> 0:16:05.200 could get eighty percent of what you wanted with so 0:16:05.400 --> 0:16:06.760 much less of the surveillance. 0:16:08.520 --> 0:16:11.200 Suddenly Ethan had a new mission to keep the lights 0:16:11.240 --> 0:16:14.120 on the Internet without having to sell out your audience. 0:16:15.240 --> 0:16:27.040 That's after the break. So years later, Ethan sees how 0:16:27.080 --> 0:16:30.600 the Internet has grown into a surveillance machine, partially in 0:16:30.720 --> 0:16:34.120 service of the advertising that still drives the Internet, and 0:16:34.160 --> 0:16:36.880 he started to think, could we do anything about this? 0:16:37.520 --> 0:16:40.480 My attitude in some ways is, well, can't we just 0:16:40.880 --> 0:16:41.720 end advertising? 0:16:41.800 --> 0:16:42.080 Right? Like? 0:16:42.120 --> 0:16:46.800 Advertisings a terrible model. We're paying with our attention. But 0:16:46.880 --> 0:16:49.560 here's the thing about ads. Ads turn out to be 0:16:50.680 --> 0:16:56.000 a fantastic model for a product or service that you 0:16:56.120 --> 0:16:58.400 don't know that you're willing to pay for yet. So 0:16:58.680 --> 0:17:04.040 imagine that someone is launching something new. Right, Someone in 0:17:04.080 --> 0:17:07.560 Western Massachusetts where I live, says, I don't like the 0:17:07.600 --> 0:17:09.639 way local media is working. I'm going to create a 0:17:09.640 --> 0:17:13.359 new news product. It's going to be video first, and 0:17:13.400 --> 0:17:16.040 it's going to be put together by citizens. And I'm like, well, 0:17:16.040 --> 0:17:18.720 that might be interesting, but I'm not ready to put 0:17:18.800 --> 0:17:21.560 up ten bucks a month for it. Let me see 0:17:21.560 --> 0:17:24.360 how it's going first, and under the let me see 0:17:24.359 --> 0:17:27.040 how it's going first. Advertising is a great model. 0:17:27.720 --> 0:17:30.320 Okay, It's probably not realistic to think that the Internet 0:17:30.400 --> 0:17:33.399 could ever be totally free of ads, especially if the 0:17:33.440 --> 0:17:36.359 content is being provided for free. I mean, somebody has 0:17:36.400 --> 0:17:39.200 to get paid, right. So a few years ago, Ethan 0:17:39.280 --> 0:17:41.840 and a colleague came up with a new proposal. If 0:17:41.880 --> 0:17:43.560 ads are going to be on the Internet, and they're 0:17:43.560 --> 0:17:46.720 crucial for it to function, could we make them somehow 0:17:46.840 --> 0:17:47.520 more ethical. 0:17:47.880 --> 0:17:49.560 And I'm going to get very personal about this for 0:17:49.600 --> 0:17:51.520 a moment, because it's the example that we actually use 0:17:51.560 --> 0:17:54.720 in the paper. I am an alcoholic. I am nine 0:17:54.800 --> 0:17:58.879 years sober, but well through my twenties, thirties, forties, I 0:17:59.000 --> 0:18:02.920 drank all and I was one of those drinkers where 0:18:02.920 --> 0:18:05.200 it was like part of my personality, Like I collected 0:18:05.280 --> 0:18:11.159 scotches and you know, I researched the interesting bourbons, and 0:18:11.200 --> 0:18:15.840 so there's a whole digital trail associated with me as 0:18:15.920 --> 0:18:20.760 a drinker. I go on to Twitter, and Twitter loves 0:18:20.960 --> 0:18:25.760 advertising booze to me. They love putting up ads trying 0:18:25.760 --> 0:18:28.600 to get me to buy a nice, high end bourbon. 0:18:29.640 --> 0:18:35.120 I can't escape that data doppelganger. I can't escape that 0:18:35.600 --> 0:18:39.720 other drunk version of myself, even though I'm now off 0:18:39.760 --> 0:18:42.480 into the future. What we end up saying is that 0:18:43.040 --> 0:18:45.760 you do have a right to be forgotten, not in 0:18:45.800 --> 0:18:48.040 the sense of like you have a right necessarily be 0:18:48.119 --> 0:18:50.280 scrubbed off the Internet. But you have a right to 0:18:50.359 --> 0:18:52.760 change your mind. And so what we end up proposing 0:18:52.800 --> 0:18:57.840 is forgetful advertising, and forgetful advertising basically says you can 0:18:57.960 --> 0:19:00.560 know anything about me in this one session. You can 0:19:00.600 --> 0:19:02.119 look at the different pages that I go to on 0:19:02.160 --> 0:19:04.359 the website. You can look at the time, you can 0:19:04.400 --> 0:19:05.880 look at the date, you can look at the location, 0:19:06.000 --> 0:19:08.040 you can look at what I'm searching for. You can 0:19:08.080 --> 0:19:11.800 look at the context of those pages and use that 0:19:11.840 --> 0:19:15.800 to target an ad. What you cannot do is look 0:19:15.880 --> 0:19:18.000 at what I was looking at a month ago, a 0:19:18.080 --> 0:19:23.120 year ago, ten years ago. And we think that, yeah, 0:19:23.280 --> 0:19:26.720 it'll be less accurate, but we think it's a more 0:19:26.760 --> 0:19:29.080 ethical way to do it. And we end up suggesting 0:19:29.080 --> 0:19:31.920 that it's something like free trade coffee. There are some 0:19:32.119 --> 0:19:35.600 percentage of people who are willing to pay the money 0:19:36.119 --> 0:19:39.359 to make sure that human beings aren't being exploited, you know, 0:19:39.400 --> 0:19:42.480 for the product that we're drinking every morning. And so 0:19:42.560 --> 0:19:46.080 what we were thinking was maybe there will be websites 0:19:46.119 --> 0:19:48.439 that are willing to say we're going to do this. 0:19:48.880 --> 0:19:52.359 I'll tell you my first attempt on this was The Guardian, 0:19:52.600 --> 0:19:58.760 the British newspaper. They run all of these expos's on 0:19:58.760 --> 0:20:03.600 online surveillance, they run all the stuff about Edward Snowden, 0:20:04.080 --> 0:20:06.760 and I end up in a session with the publisher there, 0:20:06.800 --> 0:20:10.719 Alan Russbritcher, and I say, Alan, I'm looking at these 0:20:10.720 --> 0:20:14.600 stories on the Guardian and here are sixty trackers that 0:20:14.640 --> 0:20:17.439 are sending the information. Then I'm looking at this on 0:20:17.480 --> 0:20:20.000 the Guardian like it's time for you to get rid 0:20:20.000 --> 0:20:22.639 of these things. You reading the Edward Snowden article and 0:20:22.680 --> 0:20:26.200 there's trackers again. Yeah, but just the irony of that, 0:20:26.640 --> 0:20:29.119 Like it feels like if you're going to be The 0:20:29.119 --> 0:20:33.720 Guardian and a validly progressive publication, you might decide I 0:20:33.840 --> 0:20:36.080 might opt out of this form of advertising and into 0:20:36.080 --> 0:20:37.600 a more ethical form of advertising. 0:20:38.160 --> 0:20:42.600 Okay, so I just want to echo the last thing 0:20:42.680 --> 0:20:46.040 you said, ethical form of advertising. Might have remind you 0:20:46.119 --> 0:20:46.920 that those are not. 0:20:47.040 --> 0:20:48.639 Where it's the go together very often. 0:20:48.840 --> 0:20:51.600 Yeah, ethical and advertising. I can't think of the last 0:20:51.600 --> 0:20:52.760 time somebody said that to me. 0:20:53.119 --> 0:20:55.320 Let's explore it for half a second, right, So let's 0:20:55.359 --> 0:20:58.879 go and be Google for a bit. Okay, it's the 0:20:58.880 --> 0:21:03.920 middle of winter here in western Massachusetts. My roof is leaking, 0:21:04.000 --> 0:21:08.040 because everybody's roof is leaking. I go onto Google and 0:21:08.280 --> 0:21:13.040 I search roof repair Pittsfield, Massachusetts. There are a whole 0:21:13.119 --> 0:21:17.400 bunch of roofing contractors who really want my phone call, 0:21:18.080 --> 0:21:19.840 and they want my phone call because so I call 0:21:19.880 --> 0:21:22.480 them up. There's a decent chance that they're going to 0:21:22.520 --> 0:21:26.840 make five to ten thousand dollars fixing my roof. That 0:21:27.040 --> 0:21:32.080 ad click is worth anywhere between five and fifty bucks 0:21:32.520 --> 0:21:36.960 in cost per customer acquisition. Google loves that ad click, 0:21:37.160 --> 0:21:40.119 and frankly, some of the advertisers, the advertisers are like, man, 0:21:40.240 --> 0:21:44.520 here is a qualified lead outside of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to 0:21:44.600 --> 0:21:48.960 go repair a roof. That's ethical advertising, right, That is 0:21:49.000 --> 0:21:53.680 advertising that actually helps both me, somebody looking for a service, 0:21:54.200 --> 0:21:57.520 someone trying to provide a service, and the broker in 0:21:57.560 --> 0:22:00.520 the middle of those things. It is surveillance. It is 0:22:00.600 --> 0:22:04.119 aware that I am near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, so there is 0:22:04.119 --> 0:22:07.440 a certain amount of surveillance, but it's actually meeting a need. 0:22:10.080 --> 0:22:13.160 In their paper on Forgetful Advertising, Ethan and his colleague 0:22:13.160 --> 0:22:17.240 talk about what they call a DPI, a digital public infrastructure. 0:22:17.520 --> 0:22:20.160 So think of it like this, Facebook and Google ad 0:22:20.200 --> 0:22:22.480 Sense might just started out as little tools that could 0:22:22.480 --> 0:22:24.640 help you talk to your college friends or maybe help 0:22:24.680 --> 0:22:27.159 you sell t shirts. But nowadays, if you want to 0:22:27.200 --> 0:22:31.160 sell anything online you have to use those platforms. There 0:22:31.200 --> 0:22:34.160 really is no alternative. I mean, imagine if the only 0:22:34.200 --> 0:22:37.119 way to drive from Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles 0:22:37.320 --> 0:22:39.320 was to take a toll road. You can't bike, you 0:22:39.320 --> 0:22:41.360 can't walk, you can't take a bus, you can't take 0:22:41.359 --> 0:22:44.240 a train, You can only take that expensive toll road. 0:22:44.720 --> 0:22:51.119 There should be an alternative Forgetful advertising is just alternative infrastructure. Again, 0:22:51.119 --> 0:22:54.000 they're not saying that they want to abolish Google ad Sense, 0:22:54.200 --> 0:22:57.479 They're just building another option for people who prefer something, 0:22:57.680 --> 0:23:02.880 as Ethan would put it, more ethical. But Ethan's work 0:23:02.920 --> 0:23:07.000 on fixing the Internet doesn't stop there. He's got another idea, 0:23:07.080 --> 0:23:09.560 and believe it or not, it kind of goes back 0:23:09.600 --> 0:23:11.920 to that hack that he's most famous for. 0:23:12.800 --> 0:23:16.760 Here's the interesting thing. Unless you are hanging out in 0:23:16.840 --> 0:23:19.919 certain corners of the Internet and man that's between you 0:23:19.960 --> 0:23:23.680